"Mastering the Master" appeared in
slightly different form in The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era,
edited
by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley
(Hanover:University Press of New England, 1997).

Mastering the Master: Appropriations of
Crisis
Conversion in Emily Dickinson's Poems of 1863

By Aliki Barnstone

Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray. (L2780)

—Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's religion was Poetry.(Howe 48)

—Susan Howe

The old words are numb—and there a'
nt any new ones—Brooks—are
useless—in Freshet—time— (L252)

—Emily Dickinson

I cannot tell when I first became aware that she had elected her own
way of
life.(Bianchi 48)

—Martha Bianchi Dickinson

*****
On the outskirts of the city of Madison, Wisconsin, where I once
lived, a sign in front of a farm reads, All the world guilty before
God.
The Puritan tradition of guilt and original sin, familiar to Emily
Dickinson, has sustained its power for a long time. Indeed to the Wisconsin farmer who proclaims,“All the world guilty before God,” she might dare ask if God himself is te guilty party. “Whether Deity's guiltless/My business is to find!” (Fr 175). So Emily Dickinson
So Emily
Dickinson
talked with the Master but rejected the orthodox premise for the
conversation. In the poem beginning “The Bible is an antique Volume- /Written by faded men,” she mockingly writes that sin is “a distinguished Precipice/ Others must resist” (Fr 1577; 1882). But Dickinson maintained her worldliness as when she writes,“The mysteries of human nature surprass the 'mysteries of redemption.'” She was an outsider, resisting the religious revivals of her time and her
education
at the evangelical Mount Holyoke Seminary:

How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the
spirit and we don't know it's [sic] name, and it won't go away, either
Heaven is seeming greater, or Earth a great deal more small, or God is
more
“Our Father,” and we feel our need increased. Christ is calling
everyone
here, all my companions have answered . . . . I cant tell you what they
have found, but they think it is something precious. I wonder if it
is?
How strange is this sanctification, that works such a marvelous change,
that sows in such corruption, and rises in golden glory, that brings
Christ
down, and shews him, and lets him select his friends! (L 35)

*****
The letter asserts that she has chosen not to join the flock. She is
skeptical about what her companions have found, and that skepticism
leads
to satire. Dickinson makes fun of the notions of status and size,
casting
perception into doubt. Heaven seems greater and earth smaller. God is
a
greater father while humanity feels its need increased in the face of
its
own lowliness. The people around her think they have found “something
precious,” but Dickinson questions the value of their truth, pointing
out
that the hierarchy is perceived by some but not by others; she casts
her
uncertainty in the telling understatement: “I wonder if it is.” Yet
her
friends' perception of Christ's ascendancy gives Him His power and
“lets
him select his friends” (while presumably excluding the unelect). The
letter also reveals Dickinson's loneliness. That her friends and
family
converted gave her a double sorrow, for she was shut out of love in two
ways: Christ did not come down and “select” her for a friend, and her
earthly friends who stood with Christ abandoned her, for they, with the
other elect, would be together on the other side. Conversion became
something “desolate that creeps over the spirit.” Through satire
Dickinson
contends with this desolation, with election's pain-inflicting
companions:
loss and exclusion.
*****
The tone of the above 1850 letter—also the year her first poem is
dated—combines satirical whimsy with lament. And in the poems written
in
this first stage of her career, she similarly satirizes election from
the
vantage of her own exclusion. Fighting off her cultural inheritance,
an
outsider, she sets her language apart from the voices she mocks,
frequently
framing the mocked voices in quotation marks, as in these humorous
lines at
the end of the poem beginning “'Arcturus' is his other name / I'd
rather
call him 'Star'”:

Perhaps the “Kingdom of Heaven's” changed
I hope the “Children” there
Won't be “new fashioned” when I come — And laugh at me— and stare —

I hope the Father in the skies
Will lift his little girl —
Old fashioned — naughty — everything —
Over the stile of “Pearl.”
(Fr 117, 1859)

In this poem, as in many early poems, she throws into doubt
conventional,
theological, and even scientific naming. By taking the position of the
“naughty” girl, she makes fun of those who imagine the mystery of an
afterlife in the terms of familiar social categories.
*****
In another early poem, she transforms prayer into a jesting nursery
rhyme:

Papa above!
Regard a mouse
O'erpowered by the Cat!
Reserve within thy kingdom

A “Mansion” for the Rat!
(J 61; Fr
151;
1860)

The tone of the line, “A 'Mansion' for the Rat!” mixes outrage with the
ominous and even the grotesque. This stanza lowers the reverent
diction of
“Our father who art in heaven” to the familiar and rather taunting,
“Papa
above!”
As she says in another poem beginning, “Going to Heaven” (Fr 128), “I'm
glad
I don't believe it.” As these poems show, Dickinson is able in her
early
poems to set her language apart from the voices she satirizes; she is
engaged in an externalized battle with her cultural inheritance.
*****
These early satirical poems culminate around 1863, when she
internalizes the battle and begins the second period of her career. (I use “the poems of 1863” as a category because close to four
hundred
of Dickinson's poems are dated 1863. This means that she was writing
over
a poem a day in that year or that she was making fair copy into
fascicles
and letters at this prolific rate. Whether Dickinson actually composed
these poems in 1863 or whether she finished revising them in that year
does
not matter for my purpose, which is to draw the large outline of her
development. Two of the poems, “There's a certain Slant of light” (Fr
320) and “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr 340), that I use as
prototypes of her “self-conversion” period are dated 1862. The
astonishing number of poems produced in the period in and around the
year
1863 shows that during this time Dickinson was deeply preoccupied with
an
internal struggle with Calvinism and with love. This love--whether of
God
or of another person--is shaped by Calvinism's severity, its
associations
with loss and exclusion, and its power to overwhelm. I believe by
writing
so many poems in this period, Dickinson performed a kind of ritual
mastery
over the forces she felt could master her: religion, love, ecstatic
experience. Traditionally, Dickinson's ^annus mirabilis^ has set been
1862,
based on Johnson's dating, is 1862, but Franklin's 1998 Variorum sets
the
date at 1863.) She
has what one might call a grand intertextual experience. When she
writes,
“The Brain is wider than the Sky / . . . / The one the other will
contain /
With ease—and You—beside—,” she observes that the text of the world
forms
the text of her mind. In a letter she affirms her conversion to
poetry:
“Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray”(L 278). Susan Howe
puts
it succinctly: “Emily Dickinson's religion was Poetry” (Howe 48).
*****
As a consequence of her internal combat with her religious and
cultural inheritance, in the second phase of her poetic development,
numbness emerges as one of Dickinson's primary poetic modes. Thus, Dickinson observes
that
the saved man “hath endured / The dissolution—in Himself” (Fr 659539).
Internal
forces rage, paining her, overwhelming, dividing, and ultimately
numbing
her. This numbing is frequently an inner death. Or the self is
dislocated
or multiple. She depicts this self-division relentlessly, as the first
lines of these famous poems show:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (Fr 340)

I got so I could take his name / Without Tremendous gain / That
Stop—sensation—on my Soul (Fr 292)

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (Fr 372)

I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there
(Fr 357)

There's a Languor in the life / More imminent than Pain
(Fr 552)

The Soul has Bandaged moments— (Fr 760)

Pain—has an Element of Blank— (P 650)

In these numb poems, as in conversion, the self is numb to itself.
Because
Dickinson contains the self-exiling theology of crisis conversion in
the
poems, they are a form of mastery—a mastery of containment through
language. (When I describe the self in pain, I do not wish to engage in the
kind of
psychobiography-correctly refuted by Juhasz, Miller, and Smith in Comic
Power and by Elizabeth Phillips in Personae and Performance-which
one-dimensionally portrays Dickinson as a tragic figure. From my
perspective, Phillips makes an excellent point when she observes that
the
intensity of poems from this period dramatic monologue s and literary
performances: “She writes 'as the Representative' of the verse and the
“supposed person” to claim the privilege to draw upon whatever
resources
are available to her for writing. . . . the dramatic monologue is a
genre
by which to move beyond 'me, myself' into a relationship with them. The
view that she wrote almost exclusively about herself, however, pervades
Dickinson studies” (81). As all writers must, Dickinson drew on her own
experiences in order to dramatize the “supposed person.” I am depicting
a
process in this chapter, as well as the ways in which, through her
writing,
the poet traversed the theological and relational realms.)
*****
Dickinson's mastery means
annihilating the self to transform it into art. Her language exceeds
conventional
boundaries because, as she writes in a letter to Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, she is not the subject of a ruler; she has annihilated the
governing language of sin and abjectness: “I had no Monarch in my
life,
and cannot rule myself, and when I try to organize—my little Force
explodes—and leaves me bare and charred—” (L 271).(These words in letter 271 scan perfectly in iambic tetrameters and
trimeters, Dickinson's characteristic hymnal meter. Her letters carry
the
same radical poetics as her identified verse, as well as the same
spiritual
battle for liberation.) Sixty years before
Eliot's “Waste Land,” Emily Dickinson, in a numb desolation in which no
Monarch prevails, creates an intensely personal idiolect and radical
poetics, all of which bloom in her own proto-modernism.
*****
Accordingly, in this David and Goliath allegory,
she
regards her earlier assaults as self-destructive:

I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I aimed my Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell— (Fr 449; 1862)

*****
The
poems that recount pain—with this wavering circumference and the
deadening
of that pain—frequently have a male figure as the source of the soul's
dilemma. For example, in “I got so I could take his name” (which plays
on
“taking the Lord's name in vain”), it is a “He” who causes “That
Stop—sensation—on my Soul.” In some numb poems, there are two internal
male figures—one godly, one demonic—vying to conquer the soul. In “The
Soul has Bandaged Moments—” a personified thought, “a Goblin,” accosts
another personified thought, the “Lover,” who is “a Theme so fair.” In
“'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,” the masculine figures are
more specifically godly and demonic:

And not a Sinew—stirred—could help,
And sense was setting numb—
When God—remembered—and the Fiend—
Let go, then, overcome— (Fr 425:1862)

*****
This vast and embattled self has particular significance for
Calvinist election. First, even though Dickinson may have chosen not
to
heed Christ's call, she reveals that the internal imperative to do so
remains. Second, this self with its compromised boundaries corresponds
to
what the soul must endure in the conversion process. The Calvinist
self,
like the self in Dickinson's numb poems, will be divided,
self-annihilated,
and overwhelmed. Crisis conversion, as Mitchell Breitwieser writes in
his
discussion of Cotton Mather, begins with a “severe trauma” in which the
self discovers it continues “only by the arbitrary kindness of God . .
. Mather repeatedly calls it a kind of dying . . . A part of thought
would
step out of self and look upon it. It would see two things: sin, that
is
the baseness and vanity of self; and its inability to correct error”
(28—29). Once the self is annihilated and thereby utterly submissive to
divine will, “the law can be seen clearly” and “the mind can rise to
survey
the whole pattern in which it has accepted its part” (30).
*****
Cotton Mather strives to give himself to God by abasing
consciousness. Thus, in his diary he writes, “There is nothing of more
Consequence to my Safety and Welfare, than a constant strain, of the
most
self abasing Humility. Wherefore I would constantly chase all vain
Thoughts, and Vainglorious Ones out of my Mind, with the greatest
Abhorrence of them” (qtd. In Breitwieser 32). This hunt in which the
self
is prey is itself a form of consciousness in that it drives out what
Dickinson might call “Fiendish” thoughts. By implication, it must
maintain
the thoughts focused on God, so that, in Dickinson's terms, God will
“remember” and the “Fiend / Let go, then, Overcome.”
*****
Dickinson's doubt goes beyond orthodox uncertainty. She
internalizes the conflict—and its attendant doubt—that before was
externalized. The numb poems fight dual internal battles: one the
Calvinist battle against the self and the other against a cultural
inheritance urging just such conversion. The enigmatic poem, “Me from
Myself— to banish—” is a model for Dickinson's transformation
of
crisis conversion into poetry; it can be read both as a prayer for the
self—banishment of conversion and as a description of Dickinson's
poetics.
The poem, as in the Bible, proceeds by logical parallelism and speaks
in
riddles. In the Gospel of Mark, when the Twelve ask Jesus why he
speaks in
parables he answers that it is to keep the unelect outside, “That
seeing
they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not
understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins
should be forgiven them” (4:12). In this poem, as in so many others,
Dickinson the outsider adopts the strategy of the Jesus parables, in
which, as Frank Kermode puts it, “The riddle remains dark, so does the
gospel” (47). Thus, “Me from Myself— to Banish—” poses a riddle that
with
each line is complicated and questioned, recomplicated and
requestioned;
with each articulation, the darkness is intensified, but, as in one of
Mark
Rothko's dark canvases, there is much to see in the blackness:

But since Myself — assault Me —
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except Abdication —
Me — of Me?

+impregnable +to foreign Heart
(Fr 709; 1863)

*****
On the one hand, this poem employs the language of Calvinism and
expresses Dickinson's desire to convert. On the other, the poem turns
Calvinist language against itself. Thus, if the questions asked in
Dickinson's poem are answered affirmatively, then the poem rehearses
the
anguish of conversion and advocates banishment, subjugation, and
abdication
of the self, just as would the Puritan seeking to give herself to God.
The
assaulted self in Dickinson's poem wants “peace / . . . by
subjugating /
Consciousness” or, in Mather's terms, must “constantly chase all vain
Thoughts” out of mind. Likewise, the self must abdicate its position
as
ruler in order to be subject to God.
*****
Since one can never be assured of salvation, it is fitting that a
Calvinist reading of “Me from Myself—to banish—” is equivocal. The
poem
resists theology with its doubting structure in the way each line
questions
the previous line. David Porter's observation that Dickinson's poems
move
“from belief to questioning and disjunction” (91) is true of the
structure
of “Me from Myself” which moves from an assertion in the first stanza
to
two questions in the second and third stanzas. The disjunction is in
self
from self and, as Dickinson writes in another poem, in “internal
difference
/ Where the Meanings, are” (Fr 320). That is to say, the first stanza
states that the exaction of conversion is self—banishment and that the
desired result is to be invincible to the temptations of the heart. To
shut out the self that cherishes corrupt worldly love would make the
speaker free to accept Christ's love. However, although the poem
implies
God by the language of conversion theology, it does not mention God
(and,
as Marianne Moore observes, “Omissions are not accidents”). (“Omissions are not accidents,” written by Moore, is the epigraph of
The
Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.) By
omitting
God, Dickinson circles back to the “Fortress” that is “Myself.” In
this
alternative reading, the double meaning of the pivotal line, “Had I
Art,”
moves away from the more humble, “had I means,” toward the more
self—reflexive, “had I Poetry.” The self wishes to shut out the love
of
God, to construct a fortress of the self that would be impregnable to
God's
invasive Word. In the fortress that she constructs with her own human
word, God's intrusive divine Word will not penetrate. In the same
moment
that the poem seems to assert faith, it likewise asserts the
disjunction in
the self—annihilating requirements of Calvinist conversion. That
disjunction turns the poem toward self—conversion, which is to say, her
conversion to art.
*****
The poem's disjunctive structure is typical of Dickinson's poetic
strategy. Martha Dickinson Bianchi says that the Puritan's “shadows
hung
over” the poet. Even after she saw the “fictional quality” of their
theology. Karl Keller writes that Dickinson cannot escape the very
religious vision she protests: She stamps her foot at what she stands
on.
She yells at the voice she yells with. Like the Brahma, it is with
Puritan
wings that she has the power to flee the Puritan past” {67—68}. Seen in
this way, the assaulted self in the second stanza is the one who is
attacked by its cultural inheritance; she achieves peace by
“subjugating”
the consciousness that contains that inheritance. The poem, then, may
be
seeking to banish not the self that resists conversion, but the self
that
is infused with conversion's self-banishing theology.
*****
Thus, the poem addresses the problem of the split self
by
suggesting that each self is so integrally related to the other that
abdication is impossible. If one returns to the first stanza, one can
see
that the poem's impossible formula of self-banishment hinges on the
subjunctive, “Had I Art.”
“Mutual Monarchs,” “Me” and “Me,” are the author and the Calvinist
text,
each subject to the other, and each author of the other's being.

Of course—I prayed—
And did God Care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird—had stamped her foot—
And cried “Give Me”—
My Reason—Life—
I had not had—but for Yourself—
'Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom's Tomb—
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb—
Than this smart Misery (Fr 581; 1863)

God's indifference triggers Dickinson's experience of self—banishment,
numbness, self—conversion, and art. Numb poems, such as “Me from
Myself—to
banish” and the one above describe a religious and artistic practice.
Again and again they record a self—banishment that ends not in
conversion,
but in poetry. These poems, like the experience of crisis conversion,
can
be regarded as ecstatic, for ekstasis in its Greek etymology is to be
“put
out of place,” that is to say, to stand outside oneself. The self is
moved
to some other state. In Dickinson's case, when the self stands
outside,
its boundaries can be filled (or expanded) by God or art. Thus, in
Dickinson's lines of numbness (“Pain—has an element of Blank—”
and
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes—” for example) the
ecstatic religious experience of conversion is an analogy for ecstatic
artistic experience. It is Dickinson's art—and not God— that elects
her to
immortality. I call this practice, “self-conversion.”
*****
As Cynthia Griffin Wolff points out,
conversion
was popularly regarded as just such “a falling into Love's powerful
attraction”: “For the women especially, this Christ Who came to call
for
them so importunately— offering himself as the 'Bridegroom' of
salvation
and beseeching them to become 'Brides of Christ' by accepting
faith—could
be a compelling Suitor” (103). Dickinson makes these connections
between
conversion and both kinds of love, profane and holy. Since she is
always
turning toward self-conversion, she, too, is evangelical in the sense
that
she wants the reader to convert to her. In the following poem, she
proclaims that “The Saints” will remember her:

*****
For all her criticism, Dickinson is not cynical about conversion or
love. If conversion were reciprocal, it would indeed be a divine love,
a
mutual reading in which both selves ecstatically stood aside for the
other.
One can see this hope in one of Dickinson's most despairing pieces of
writing, the second “Master Letter,” which, like most of the numb
poems,
was written in ????1862?.

MASTER.
***
If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was'nt shot —you
might
weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.
****
One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy's bosom— then
would
you believe? Thomas' faith in Anatomy, was stronger than his faith in
faith. God made me—[Sir] Master—I did'nt be— myself. I dont know how
it
was done. He built the heart in me— Bye and bye it outgrew me—and like
the
little mother—with the big child—I got tired holding him. I heard of a
thing called “Redemption”—which rested on men and women. You remember
I
asked you for it—you gave me something else. I forgot the Redemption
[in
the Redeemed—and I did'nt tell you for a long time, but I knew you had
altered me—I] was tired—no more—[so dear did this stranger become that
were
it, or my breath—the Alternative—I had tossed the fellow away with a
smile.] . . . .If it had been God's will that I might breathe where you
breathed—and find the place— myself—at night . . . .the prank of the
Heart
at play on the heart—in holy Holiday—is forbidden me—
***
I dont know what you can do for it—thank you—Master—but if I had the
Beard on my cheek—like you—and you—had Daisy's petals— and you cared so
for
me—what would become of you? . . . . Say I may wait for you—say I need
go
with no stranger to the to me— untried [country] fold . . . .

*****
Although this letter is “a world desolated . . . by the loss of . .
. communication,” it contains instructions to the Master—reader, who,
even
as he acts on the letter in order to read it, must stand outside
himself to
make way for the text. Dickinson teaches belief and doubt: “If you saw
a
bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he was'nt shot—you might weep at his
courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.” This injunction,
which
might be summarized as, “believe not words, but you what you see” is
followed by a fervent request for the Master to believe “not what you
see,
but words.” He is to believe a metaphor: that the words on the page
are a
drop of blood from the wound on “Daisy's bosom.” (Wolff explains, “The letter clearly implies that although the
beloved
ought to have been able to infer her pain (even though she disavowed it
when they were together), the written words of this letter must play a
role
in making the invisible wound apparent” (408).) “Thomas' faith in Anatomy, was stronger than his faith in
faith.”
But to what kind of anatomy is she referring? The sentences preceding
and
succeeding the adage about Thomas refer to the anatomy of the soul, to
Daisy's wounded bosom with its self made by God and its heart built by
God,
the heart that outgrows its boundaries and “—like the little
mother—with
the big child—” becomes tiring and stands outside as a “him.”
*****
This anatomy of the soul is also the anatomy of the “thing called
'Redemption' which rested on men and women.” Which “fellow” is it who would be tossed away “with a
smile”? Breath, Redemption, the stranger, the heart “built by God,”
the
him, the her, or the it?
*****
Dickinson speaks both in the first person and in the third
person as Daisy; to say “God made me . . . I did'nt be—myself” is to
say “I
didn't become myself by my own volition,” “I didn't have being,” and “I
didn't have being by my own volition.” She is left in
the
place where “We must meet apart,” with her art, wit, the blankness of
doubt, and “that White Sustenance / Despair” (Fr 706; 1963).
*****
Yet even as the letter shows the impossibility of redemption
through love, it asserts its possibility by asking the Master for
empathy.
If the Master would believe, he would convert. He would become a
woman:
“but if I had the Beard on my cheek—like you—and you—had Daisy's
petals—and
you cared so for me—what would become of you?”
Even the Puritans questioned whether their understanding
of
the Word was God's absolute meaning or a product of Fancy. Dickinson
goes
farther than doubting whether her perception is true. She takes
pleasure
in multiplicity and even in one poem declares, “the Object Absolute is
Nought.” (James McIntosh writes that one of “Dickinson's key principles . . .
is
the idea that belief and thought and feeling are transient, that one's
mental life is continually in flux. Mostly, Dickinson prefers it that
way.
. . . she cherishes evanescence and makes poetry out of 'internal
difference.”(2)) Although she appropriates religious discourse, she
equivocates.
Her poems, as Mutlu Konuk Blasing writes, “[rule] out any authoritative
reading” (178). The poem “There's a certain Slant of light” invites
this
sort of equivocating slant on God:

There's a certain Slant of light
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it—Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death— (Fr 320; 1862)

*****
As in “Me from Myself—to banish,” “There's a certain Slant of
light” does not mention God, but nevertheless undercuts His Supreme
Authority. Dickinson's Puritan predecessors, Mary Rowlandson
and
Anne Bradstreet, upheld the tenet of affliction as a good lesson.
Rowlandson makes her captivity narrative public “for the Benefit of the
Afflicted” (317).
*****
Unlike Rowlandson and Bradstreet, Dickinson is not reassured that
affliction is the sign of God's Paternal Omnipresence. Rather,
affliction
is the sign of His absence and His inscrutability. Whatever sign the
Lord
may appear to send only further obscures knowledge of Him, thereby
intensifying the affliction. ( As Wolff sees it, “If God's absence is compensated by words and
signs,
these are forms that . . . .[insinuate] falsehood into our
beliefs-revising
our “sight” so we can accept his mutilations without complaint. God
urges
us to seek Him, but when “enlightenment” comes, it is knifelike and
cold-[“a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons-”] . . . . God
still
refuses to loosen the Seal of Revelation; instead he inflicts the “Seal
Despair” . . . . And this, too, invades the coherence of the self . . .
.
God's prevarications and false promises call . . . we turn away . . .
and
still the mind has been violated and sullied-even if only with the
desire
for hope”(155).) In “There's a certain Slant of light,”
Dickinson appropriates God's signs and fills them with empty despair.
*****
This blankness throws affliction's “imperial” modification into
question. Affliction seems to come out of nowhere, out of “the air”;
it
has no sign—“We can find no scar”—and no significance—“But internal
difference / Where the meanings, are.” Even light, God's emissary, is
merely the object of a preposition, not worthy of being a subject nor
of
being capitalized. It is the light's “Slant” that is subject and
capitalized. And that slant seems to hit each word at a different
angle.
The
slant
is also Dickinson's oblique self receiving orthodox messages.
The poem's end is filled with loss:
the
loss of the light and the loss of the speaker and the reader as they
exit
the poem. The
“Slant
of light,” in all its variety, refracts infinitely in each facet of the
“it” that it illuminates. The light, God's sign, is multiple, not
absolute.
Paradoxically, by refuting religious doctrine, she restores God's
unknowability and thereby asserts a fundamental tenet of Puritanism.
In
her doubt, she is a most pure Puritan.
*****
In that blankness is Emily Dickinson's poetry, a poetry devoted to
the unknowable. In her ambiguity of meaning, her fragmented form, her
doubt
and parody of tradition and God, in her finding her home in the
wasteland
of self-division and in her transference of meaning from God to poetry,
Dickinson anticipated the concerns and techniques of the modernists.
Her
doubt and radical theology of self-conversion provide her with the
language
of negation, the tongue of blankness, and the slanted faith of her
proto-modernist poetry. Brilliant, innovative, it is her Faith.